MORE ELECTRONIC BOOKS COMING TO MOBILE PHONES

Trying to increase the popularity of e-books, Google said thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PC were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1.

Coincidentally, Amazon also announced that it was going to release the titles of the Kindle on a variety of mobile phones. However, Amazon did not reveal when the titles would be available. Approximately, the Kindle offers 230.000 titles.

Actually, there is a difference between the services offered by Google and the Kindle. Google pretty much offers older books for which the copyrights have expired, whereas, the Kindle offers newly released books, even current best sellers. However, Google said that it would make other types of books available on mobile in the future, including out of print titles and current books. Another thing Google is working on is to provide text for the mobile version, allowing users to download printed material over wireless networks.

Some people fear that the new ability of phones to read books would hurt devices like the Kindle, however, experts believe that this new feature would be used for quick access to reading material, not for long form reading which would be excruciating.

According to Michael Gartenberg, an independent technology analyst "Consumers will trade a certain amount of quality for convinience and cost".

I think that this article is very important for our "Three Screen Class". As time goes by, more and more applications are being adapted to be used with our mobile devices. Some of them are not as practical as other ones, for example, I find the whole reading things on cellphones a little daunting, I mean, I would never atttemp to read an entire book on my cell phone (heck, I still have headaches trying to read stuff off my computer for long periods of time), however, I think that some people would find this feature appealing. The thing that called my attention from this article is seeing how many things are being tailored and developed for cellphones. In a not so distant future, we might be able to do everything we do on our computers on our cellphones, which is a pretty interesting idea.

Here are the sources of the article:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/google-mobile-b.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/technology/internet/06google.html?em